The development of the modern Internet-based data communication systems and ever increasing demand for bandwidth have spurred an unprecedented progress in development of high capacity wireless systems. The major trends in such systems design are the use of multiple antennas to provide capacity gains on fading channels and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to facilitate the utilization of these capacity gains on rich scattering frequency-selective channels. Since the end of the last decade, there has been an explosion of interest in multiple-input multiple-output systems (MIMO) and a lot of research work has been devoted to their performance limits and methods to achieve them.
One of the fundamental issues in multiple antenna systems is the availability of the channel state information at transmitter and receiver. While it is usually assumed that perfect channel state information (CSI) is available at the receiver, the transmitter may have perfect, partial or no CSI. In case of the single user systems, the perfect CSI at the transmitter (CSIT) allows for use of a spatial water-filling approach to achieve maximum capacity. In case of multi-user broadcast channels (the downlink), the capacity is maximized by using the so called dirty paper coding, which also depends on the availability of perfect CSIT. Such systems are usually refereed to as closed-loop as opposed to open-loop systems where there is no feedback from the receiver and the transmitter typically uses equal-power division between the antennas.
In practice, the CSI should be quantized to minimize feedback rate while providing satisfactory performance of the system. The problem has attracted attention of the scientific community and papers provided solutions for beam-forming on flat-fading MIMO channels where the diversity gain is the main focus. Moreover, some authors dealt with frequency-selective channels and OFDM modulation although also those papers were mainly devoted to beamforming approach.
Unfortunately, availability of full CSIT is unrealistic due to the feedback delay and noise, channel estimation errors and limited feedback bandwidth, which forces CSI to be quantized at the receiver to minimize feedback rate. The problem has attracted attention of the scientific community and papers have provided solutions for single-user beamforming on flat-fading MIMO channels, where the diversity gain is the main focus. More recently, CSI quantization results were shown for multi-user zero-forcing algorithms by Jindal.